Military and civilian officials said they also expected the release soon of abducted U.S. missionary the Rev. Brian Lawrence, 30, of Madison, Wis.

''I will bring him out by Monday,'' said Tarhata Alonto Lucman, 58, an influential Moslem princess who negotiated the release of the nuns.

Looking tired but in good spirits, the nuns, who were kidnapped last week, were turned over to the Moslem elders at dawn in the town of Lumba Yanagi. It is outside Marawi, the predominantly Moslem capital of Lanao del Sur province, 500 miles south of Manila.

Lucman said the emissaries handed to the kidnappers 200,000 pesos, worth $10,000, raised by local officials. Besides the money, negotiators also gave the kidnappers two U.S.-made M-16 rifles and two walkie-talkies and promised to work for a grant of amnesty, Lucman said.

''We were treated very well, just like guests,'' Sister Marie Magdaleine Ledesma, mother superior of the kidnapped nuns, told reporters in Marawi.

''It was like a picnic,'' added Sister Divinagracia Bagsican.

The 10 nuns of the Carmelite Order were abducted at gunpoint Friday night from their hilltop convent in the lake-shore provincial capital and whisked away aboard a boat.

Ledesma said the kidnappers claimed to belong to a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moslem separatist group leading a war for self- rule for the nation's 5 million Moslems, most of whom live in the south.

''They want to get some attention from the government,'' Ledesma said, adding the rebels were seeking the immediate implementation of the Tripoli Agreement, which grants limited autonomy to the Moslems of Mindanao island and the Sulu archipelago.